Games Without Frontiers

Doctor Strange

The fourteenth film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and the first since Marvel Studios divested itself from Marvel Entertainment and became part of the Walt Disney Company, first feints at a different approach to the previous thirteen – here our Hero must learn something about the limits of his ego before returning stronger, fitter, faster to the supernal path of self-esteem and individuality – then reverts to the successful formula of a single man saving the Multiverse and everything in it. That this Orientalist confection succeeds so well at wedding the Mythological scale of the Marvel Superhero to the sudden shifts of perspective attendant to the computer-generated age of digital Cinema is down to Doctor Strange‘s visual panache, a typically-stentorian and theatrically-accomplished performance as Doctor Strange by Benedict Cumberbatch and the realization of the longstanding connection between the Cosmological doctrines of Theosophy and the Pulp traditions of storytelling from which Doctor Strange so evidently draws its inspiration:-